Culture and Economic Decline

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At MercatorNet, Sheila Liaugminas looks at the bank regulation push — enshrined in another 2,000 page document that few of the legislators behind this effort will actually read. In “Social Order on the Surface” she recalls an Acton conference where she heard this from Rev. Robert A. Sirico:

Politicians are not our leaders in a rightly ordered society, they are our followers … Not all views of culture are equal. but we can’t engage socially on our disagreements because everything becomes political … There is no legislature that can govern the human heart … A correct understanding of who the human person is is important to social ordering. Man is prior to the state. You can’t have a ‘common good’ if the good of the individual is not taken into consideration first.

“Statism is expanding in the U.S. right now under the guise of ‘the common good,'” Laugminas said. “Acton is only one institute engaging the debate about how Washington is handling the moral and ‘economic dimension of human reality,’ but we’d better pay attention.”

Advancing the “common good” behind the banner of statism has turned out to be an exercise in reckless selfishness and rapidly advancing insecurity. Where the gospel of redistribution of wealth was advertised as a way to ensure social equality, it now threatens to impoverish great masses of those who bought into the glittering promises. And promises are still being made. Recall President Obama telling Joe the Plumber that “spreading the wealth around” would be good for everybody (see video above).

Culture matters, much more so than politics. In “End of the European Siesta?,” Guy Sorman on City Journal explains why the financial fix for Europe’s debt problems are really superficial and temporary. Europe, he contends, needs to throw off the socialist ideologies — now embedded in cultural attitudes — that are at odds with its founding free market philosophy.

… the European Union is based on a free market. It was so conceived in political philosophy and in economics, and the only possible way to govern it is in accordance with such economic freedom. Yet all the national governments, even those of the right, have in fact created gigantic welfare states inspired by socialist ideology.

The fact is that, at the origins of Europe, Jean Monnet, a Cognac entrepreneur with strong American connections, concluded that European governments had never succeeded and would never succeed in making Europe a zone of peace and prosperity. He thus replaced the diplomatic engine with an economic engine: free trade and the spirit of enterprise, he envisioned, would generate “concrete areas of solidarity” that would eliminate war and poverty.

The “fatal drift” away from economic freedom, Sorman explains, inevitably led to the EU project going off the rails. Is America headed down the same path? Is the culture of free enterprise, for so long integral to what it means to be an American, now in permanent decline? More from Sorman on Europe:

Unfortunately, the national governments thought it possible to reap the economic benefits of a free Europe and the electoral delights of socialism. By “socialism,” I mean the unlimited growth of the welfare state—the accumulation of entitlements and jobs protected by the state. This de facto socialism, this sedimentation of electoral promises and acquired rights, grew in Europe at a much faster rate than did the economy or the population. It could thus only be financed by loans, which seemed risk-free, since the euro appeared “strong.” The euro’s strength drove its holders into a frenzy: suddenly, anything could be bought on credit. The result was a remarkably homogeneous indebtedness in all the countries of Europe, on the order of 100 percent of national wealth—ranging between Germany’s 91 percent and the Greeks’ 133 percent (a relatively modest difference), all reflecting a common socialist drift. Germany, Greece, Spain, and France differ less in their levels of debt or modes of administration, which are in fact quite similar, than in their debtors’ capacities to repay. All European states are run socialist-style, in contradiction with the European Union’s free-market principles. Some will be more able than others to deal with defaults, but all have drifted off course.

How shall we explain this fatal drift? The true cause lies in ideology. Socialism dominates minds across Europe, whereas liberalism—which has retained its original free-market meaning in Europe—is under attack in the academy, in the media, and among intellectuals generally. In Europe, to support the market against the state, to recommend modesty on the part of the state, is taken for an “American” perversion. And socialist ideology is sufficiently engrained that it’s almost impossible for a non-suicidal politician to win election without promising still more public “solidarity” and still less individual risk. These welfare states, through their financial cost and the erosion of ethical responsibility that they foster, have smothered economic growth in Europe. We are the continent of decline, albeit decline with solidarity.

John Couretas
John Couretas is Director of Communications, responsible for print and online communications at the Acton Institute. He has more than 20 years of experience in news and publishing fields. He has worked as a staff writer on newspapers and magazines, covering business and government. John holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in the Humanities from Michigan State University and a Master of Science Degree in Journalism from Northwestern University.

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Comments

Roger McKinney

Excellent analysis! And I might add that the rise of socialism has happened as traditional Christianity declined on both continents. Socialism is the secular religion. BTW, the US and Europe are not that different. The “American” perversion that Europeans fear is a boogey man of their own invention.